As most everyone in the blogosphere knows, Bob Cargill, gave Mark Driscoll one heck of a beat-down over Driscoll’s mangled mess of a discussion of Targum Neofiti. This was a good, ‘ole fashioned, meet you out back of the bar and smack you in the face with a broken beer bottle kind of take down. Mind you, Driscoll certainly had it coming to him. The whole incident reminded me when Robin Ventura charged the mound and then was promptly put into a headlock and pounded in the face by Nolan Ryan (this fracas starts at 2:02):

But, Bob’s hit job should serve as a warning to all of us. Scholars, pastors, and everyone else who desires to seek after knowledge, should understand their own limitations. You don’t know everything. Before you start to opine on a subject that you are completely ignorant about, pause just a minute and maybe run your idea past someone who does know what they are talking about. Interdisciplinary scholarship is great and I am a huge supporter of it but before you broadcast it to the world it might be good to give it a vetting.

One last thing. When you don’t know something it is never a bad idea to tell your audience, “I don’t know.”

Influential pastors like Driscoll need a handful of evangelical biblical studies and theology profs that they can run their sermons by for an occasional checkup. God has given them too great a position for them to be careless with it.